Naomi Cooper
NASA, Rigetti Computing and the Universities Space Research Association will continue to collaborate on the second phase of a quantum technology research and development initiative funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
USRA said Thursday it was awarded a grant to extend work on DARPA’s Optimization with Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum devices program, which employs quantum processors from Rigetti to optimize the capabilities of quantum computing algorithms developed in the initial phase of the effort.
The second phase will run for two and a half years to test and evaluate the quantitative advantage of the team’s hardware using benchmarking methods.
“The challenge is to advance theory, hardware and benchmarking to bridge the gap between academic understanding of NISQ algorithms and their actual operational performance,” said Davide Venturelli, associate director for quantum at USRA and principal investigator of the award.
USRA was one of the seven university and industry teams provided with grants in 2020 to assess the potential application of quantum devices in addressing real-world combinatorial optimization challenges.
DARPA also awarded Rigetti an $8.6M grant in March 2020 to deliver its Fab-1 facility to manufacture 100-qubit quantum chips under the ONISQ program.
